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AlmaLinux stays Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible without Red Hat code

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Re: AlmaLinux stays Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible without Red Hat code

#21
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you agree with these two statements: - if Red Hat distributes software to you, they also provide access to the specific code and build instructions to build exactly what they distributed to you yourself - Red Hat will not, no matter what you do, pursue you for copyright violation for distributing GPL licensed code that you get from them. This is true even if it is one of the many GPL packages that they have substa…

Something you omitted is that one of the ways you can break the terms of your subscriber agreement with Red Hat is to exercise one of the rights guaranteed to you by the GPL, which is the right to take the "specific code and build instructions to build exactly what they distributed to you" and give them to someone else. Or to put another way, Red Hat dissuade their subscribers from exercising their rights under the G…

Red Hat (and other) EULAs have always been "against" the GPL. For example by limiting the amount of nodes you can run the software on. What they did now was close a loophole that implicitly said "if you repackage our software and distribute it separately you can ignore everything else in this agreement".

They explicitly acknowledge that the EULA does not impose restrictions on rights granted by the software licenses[0]:

> 1.4 End User and Open Source License Agreements. [...] This Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license.

So users are still free to fork and redistribute any code obtained through the subscription. Red Hat just may refuse to do further business if you do so.

To me the "spirit" of the GPL is in collaboration. All of Red Hats software projects are still available in public forges for anyone to fork and contribute. An evil or antisocial move would be to take Ceph, Podman, systemd, etc behind closed doors and require a subscription that terminates if you exercise GPL rights. But that is not what is happening here.

[0] https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20...

Re: AlmaLinux stays Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible without Red Hat code

#24
post #3

Making a RHEL clone from CentOS stream is absolutely using "Red Hat code". Also, isn't CentOS stream already ABI compatible? Just occasionally ahead of RHEL? I really don't understand the outrage from RH cracking down on clones. With entitled CentOS users going "I don't want stream, despite it being a rock solid gratis platform; I want the 10 year support battle tested code, but without giving you any money". I do un…

> I think what's really needed is a competitor to RHEL in the scientific computing/HPC space.

No idea how it looks nowadays, however I can tell how it started, back in 2004 when research institutes like CERN, were moving away from Solaris and alongside Fermilab created Scientific Linux based on Red-Hat.

I used to have a stack of pizza box Sun workstations pilled up on my research room.

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